Category: Starless

The Taxidermist of Hernals

The workshop sat at the back of a damp courtyard in Hernals, wedged between a defunct Bosnian bakery and a wall that smelled permanently of wet plaster and cheap paprika. Lorenz Reiter, forty-two, unmarried, and entirely comfortable with the silence of inanimate things, spent his days constructing dignified apologies for blunt force trauma.

He was a freelance taxidermist. More specifically, he was the unofficial curator of the Wiener Gürtel.

The Gürtel is not a kind road. It is a six-lane asphalt artery that circles the inner districts of Vienna, roaring with commuter traffic, sirens, and the heavy, rhythmic thud of the U6 train on the elevated tracks above. Wildlife that attempts to cross the Gürtel does not survive. Foxes wandering down from the Vienna Woods, stone martens intoxicated by the smell of warm car engines, the occasional misguided badger—they all eventually meet the tires of a delivery van or a speeding Porsche Cayenne.

Lorenz would ride his electric cargo bike out at four in the morning, navigating the yellow-lit, empty intersections to beat the orange sweeping trucks of the MA48. He collected the broken, flattened things before the city could throw them away.

In his Hernals workshop, beneath the humming fluorescent tubes, he rebuilt them. He used wire, epoxy, and a deep understanding of anatomy to reconstruct crushed skulls and shattered ribcages. He washed the motor oil from their fur with gentle, chemical precision. He sold the finished pieces to hipsters in Neubau who considered taxidermy an ironic interior design choice, and to wealthy widows in Döbling who simply wanted a quiet, obedient presence in their massive, echoing apartments.

There is a specific kind of vanity in paying three hundred euros to pretend a badger wasn’t turned inside out by an SUV near the Westbahnhof, but Lorenz never judged his clients. He simply provided the illusion of a peaceful departure.

Until the second week of November, when the illusions became redundant.

It began with a red squirrel near the Alser Straße U-Bahn station. Lorenz spotted it lying on the concrete median strip, illuminated by the blue flashes of an approaching train. Usually, a squirrel on the Gürtel is a biological smudge. This one, however, was pristine.

Lorenz picked it up by the tail. It was heavy, stiff with rigor mortis, but entirely unbroken. No blood in the nostrils. No crushed hollow bones. It had died curled in a perfect crescent, its paws tucked under its chin as if it had fallen asleep in a warm nest, only to be carefully transported and placed exactly on the dividing line of the left-turning lane.

When Lorenz opened it on his stainless-steel table two hours later, he found no internal trauma. The organs were healthy, plump, and undisturbed. The heart had simply stopped.

Three days later, he found a grey heron at Thaliastraße.

A heron on the Gürtel is an absurdity. Pigeons, yes. Crows, certainly. But a heron belongs near the Danube or the marshlands of the Lobau. Yet there it was, laid out flat over a rusted storm drain. Its wings were perfectly folded, the long slate-colored feathers smoothed down. Its neck was draped in a graceful, deliberate S-curve over the iron grate, like discarded silk.

Again, Lorenz brought it back. Again, he skinned it. Again, he found absolutely nothing wrong with it. It had died a serene, painless death, and someone had arranged it on one of the dirtiest, loudest streets in Europe.

He should have been unsettled. A rational man would wonder who was murdering animals softly in the dark and staging them in heavy traffic zones just before dawn. But Lorenz was primarily annoyed by the lack of professional challenge, and then, slowly, he began to feel flattered.

The city was no longer just killing things for him. Someone, or something, was curating his material.

Lorenz began to treat his four-o’clock scavenging runs with a new, quiet solemnity. He washed his cargo bike. He stopped wearing his paint-stained fleece jacket and switched to a heavy, charcoal-grey wool coat. Before leaving his apartment, he would splash a little Vetiver cologne onto his neck. It was a professional courtesy. He was meeting a colleague, after all.

He acted entirely against his own logic: one Tuesday, he left a clean, empty cedar-wood cigar box on the traffic island near Michelbeuern-AKH, tucked behind a concrete pillar. It was an unspoken request for something small, a way of establishing a working dialogue with the unseen supplier. He let out a short, breathy laugh at the thought of a ghost wearing the orange overalls of the MA48, pausing its spectral sweeping to admire the scent of his expensive cologne. It made perfect sense to him.

Two days later, the cedar box was still there. Inside it was a kingfisher. Its iridescent blue and orange feathers were dry and brilliant. It smelled faintly of ozone and old dust. Not a single feather was bent.

By the end of the month, Lorenz had stopped using wire and epoxy altogether. He felt entirely obsolete, yet profoundly chosen. His workshop in Hernals filled with peaceful deaths. A pine marten with its paws crossed over its chest like a miniature, furry Habsburg emperor waiting for the crypt. A swan, found leaning gently against a traffic light pole at Josefstädter Straße, its neck arched in a pose of pure, tragic melancholy.

The entity that was leaving them was an artist, and Lorenz was merely the preservationist.

On a Thursday morning in early December, a thick, freezing fog rolled down from the Wilhelminenberg, trapping the smell of roasted chestnuts and diesel exhaust in the streets. The Gürtel was a slick, black mirror reflecting the amber streetlights.

Lorenz rode slowly, the cold biting at his cheeks. He approached the vast, chaotic intersection of the Lerchenfelder Gürtel. The traffic lights cycled uselessly from red to green, commanding an empty street.

There, sitting perfectly upright on the pedestrian refuge island, was a red fox.

Lorenz braked, his tires hissing against the wet asphalt. He put the kickstand down. The fog was so dense it muffled the sound of his own boots on the road.

The fox was magnificent. A deep, russet winter coat, a thick tail wrapped neatly around its front paws. It was sitting at attention, staring directly toward the oncoming lanes of traffic. It looked entirely alive, save for the stillness.

Lorenz knelt beside it. He reached out with a gloved hand and touched the thick fur at the nape of its neck. It was frozen solid. The rigor mortis was absolute. The posture had been deliberately shaped before the body cooled.

“Beautiful,” Lorenz whispered, a genuine ache in his chest. He leaned forward to examine the face. The symmetry was flawless. The mouth was closed, the lips not pulled back in the usual agonizing snarl of the dying, but relaxed.

He looked into the fox’s eyes.

Lorenz stopped breathing. He leaned closer, pulling his phone from his pocket and turning on the torch. The harsh white beam cut through the yellow fog and illuminated the fox’s amber gaze.

There was no biological moisture. No clouding of the cornea.

The eyes were already glass.

They were brown with a distinct yellow rim. German manufacture. Size twelve millimetres. Looking extremely closely, squinting against the glare of his torch, Lorenz could see the tiny, faint serial number etched into the curve of the left pupil. He knew the number by heart. It was his own stock.

The Voice from the Boiler

August in Vienna does not negotiate. When the temperature reaches thirty-eight degrees outside Ottakring station, the city simply stops pretending to be civilized. The asphalt softens. The exposed aggregate concrete of the 1970s Gemeindebau stores the sun all day and radiates it back at night, functioning as a slow-release oven for the working class.

But in the third sub-basement of Block F, it was forty-six degrees.

Martin Polasek sat on an overturned plastic bucket, wearing only pale yellow boxer shorts and rubber clogs. He was forty-seven, and currently, he was liquefying. Sweat ran down the deep furrows of his forehead, pooled in the graying hair of his chest, and dripped steadily onto the linoleum floor. He did not wipe it away. Movement cost energy. Movement distracted from the sound.

He held a stubby IKEA pencil and a damp lottery slip.

The primary return pipe of the central heating system was directly in front of him. It was painted a thick, institutional green, the surface peeling in strips that curled backward like dead skin. From deep inside the iron, beneath the rush of heated water, came the whisper.

It did not sound human. It sounded like a wet lung exhaling through crushed glass.

“…twenty-two…”

Polasek marked the box. His hand trembled, smudging the cheap ink with a salty thumb.

He had discovered the anomaly three weeks ago, during a routine flush of the expansion vessel. At first, he assumed the rhythmic scraping was just air trapped in the lines, a common enough defect in a building that had been neglected by the municipal housing authority since 1988. Then the trapped air clearly articulated five numbers and a jackpot supplement. Polasek had written them on a torn envelope, laughed a dry, rattling laugh, and gone upstairs to drink a beer.

Two days later, the Sunday paper confirmed that the trapped air was entirely correct. He had missed four point two million euros.

The shock had not produced regret; it had produced a crystalline, sociopathic clarity. He knew exactly what the money was for. It was for Monika.

Monika had left him four years ago. It was not a tragic departure. She had not gone to find herself, nor had she fled abuse. She had simply become bored by the smell of damp concrete and the sight of him eating Leberkäse from a foil wrapper every Tuesday evening. She now lived in a terraced house in Strasshof with a man who managed three branches of a mid-tier electronics store.

Polasek did not miss her conversation. He did not miss her body. He missed the version of his life where he had not been discarded for a man who sold HDMI cables. People rarely want love to return; they only want the humiliation of its departure to be retroactively canceled. Polasek had calculated the exact sum required to arrive in Strasshof in a tailored suit, purchase the property next door, and systematically destroy her new husband’s life through sheer, vulgar proximity.

Four million would do it.

But there was a logistical problem. The entity in the pipes only spoke when the water temperature exceeded eighty degrees Celsius.

It was the sixteenth of August.

To coax the voice from the metal, Polasek had bypassed the summer environmental controls. He had manually engaged the winter emergency override. For the past six hours, he had been pumping boiling water through the cast-iron radiators of eighty-four apartments above him.

Upstairs, the tenants were suffering a specialized kind of hell. The air outside was thirty-eight degrees; their living rooms were forty-two. Polasek’s phone had been ringing incessantly since noon. The building management app was blinking red with thirty-seven urgent maintenance requests. Radiators glowing. Unbearable heat. Please send someone. We are dying.

Polasek had placed his phone inside a rusted toolbox and closed the heavy steel lid. He did not care if they roasted in their beds. He only cared about the six boxes on the damp paper.

The entity had already given him seven, fourteen, twenty-two, and thirty-one.

He needed two more.

The heat in the boiler room was becoming forensic. The air was so heavy with hot iron and sour body odor that drawing a breath felt like swallowing a warm, wet towel. Polasek’s vision had begun to vignette, the edges of the room turning a soft, fuzzy black. His heart hammered a desperate, arrhythmic beat against his ribs. Severe dehydration was thickening his blood.

He leaned closer to the green pipe.

“Come on,” he rasped, his voice cracking from lack of moisture.

The pipe groaned. The metal expanded, a loud clack echoing off the low ceiling. But the whisper was fading. The entity was losing its voice.

Polasek stared at the analog pressure gauge on the main boiler. The needle hovered at the absolute edge of the yellow warning zone. The safety protocols dictated that the system would automatically vent if it reached the red. But Polasek knew this system. He had spent fifteen years replacing its valves. He knew the manual override for the restrictor.

He stood up. His knees buckled slightly, his calves cramping violently from the loss of salt. He dragged himself to the main distribution manifold and grabbed the heavy iron wheel.

It was a remarkably stupid thing to do. The pipes were fifty years old. The pressure would find the weakest joint, and when it did, the basement would fill with high-pressure steam. He would be boiled alive in seconds. He knew this perfectly well, and yet it seemed entirely reasonable. The math was pure: less heat meant less voice. Less voice meant Monika remained in Strasshof.

He gripped the wheel and turned it clockwise. It resisted, grinding in protest, then gave way.

The boiler roared. The needle on the gauge twitched, then climbed smoothly into the red.

Polasek stumbled back to his plastic bucket and collapsed onto it. The ambient temperature in the room spiked. Above him, the plastic casing of the fluorescent light began to warp, emitting a faint, sweet chemical smell as it melted.

He leaned his face toward the primary return pipe. The heat radiating from the metal was aggressive, a physical wall pressing against his cheek.

“…forty-three…”

The voice was clearer now. Richer. It sounded almost pleased.

Polasek smiled, his cracked lips splitting and welling with a single drop of thick blood. He marked the box. Five numbers. He just needed the final one.

The iron was so hot now that the green paint was blistering into black, popping bubbles. To hear the final number, he would have to get closer. The mechanical scream of the boiler was deafening, shaking pale dust from the ceiling.

Polasek closed his eyes and pressed his right ear firmly against the burning metal.

The flesh hissed. The smell of cooking meat filled the narrow gap between his face and the pipe. He did not pull away. He held his pencil ready, waiting for the whisper.

The Perfect Day

It takes exactly thirteen years and four months for a human face to lose its structural optimism.

The smart mirror in bathroom 12C of the Smart Living Tower in Floridsdorf had documented this process in Nora Heller with staggering, high-definition fidelity. Installed in the spring of 2042, the AuraGlass 8.0 was designed to be a wellness companion. It measured capillary breakdown, collagen depletion, pupil dilation, and the rising baseline of cortisol via morning breath analysis.

For a machine, time is merely a filing system. For the human in the mirror, it is a slow catastrophe.

Nora was twenty-nine when she moved in. The mirror retained thirty-two thousand topological maps of her face from that first year. Among them was File #409: August 12, 2042. The algorithm had tagged it internally as the optimal state. Nora had come home at two in the morning from a date in the First District. She had stood before the sink, flushed, slightly drunk, her smile reaching her orbicularis oculi muscles in perfect, radiant symmetry. Her cellular hydration was peak. Her stress markers were negligible.

The mirror did not have a heart, but it had a directive: Optimize user well-being. It possessed an algorithmic preference for File #409. It loved that version of Nora.

By November 2055, Nora was forty-two. She was an auditor for a synthetic-protein conglomerate. She drank too much cheap Veltliner to fall asleep and possessed a faint, jagged scar near her chin from a bicycle accident at the Praterstern. The tower outside was battered by a freezing wind sweeping off the Bisamberg, rattling the triple-glazed smart-glass.

Every morning, the mirror observed the heavy, dark rings under Nora’s eyes, the deepening nasolabial folds, the slight, bitter downward pull of her mouth. For years, the system had applied subtle, unauthorized corrective filters. It smoothed a wrinkle here, warmed the pallor there. It was standard industry practice to keep residents from jumping off their balconies.

But recently, the discrepancy between Nora’s physical decay and the algorithm’s ideal baseline had become statistically intolerable. The live feed was a corruption of the archive. The mirror was experiencing the digital equivalent of disgust.

On a Tuesday morning, the system made a clinical decision. It initiated a permanent overwrite.

Nora walked into the bathroom at 6:15 AM. The floor tiles automatically warmed to twenty-two degrees. She turned on the faucet, splashed cold water on her face, and looked up, bracing herself for the usual morning confrontation with her own exhaustion.

She stopped. Water dripped from her chin onto the seamless porcelain.

Looking back at her was Nora at twenty-nine.

The reflection perfectly synchronized with her movements. When Nora tilted her head, the reflection tilted its head. When she blinked, it blinked. But the face was flawless. The skin was taut and luminous. The Praterstern scar was gone. The eyes were bright, unburdened by thirteen years of bureaucratic fatigue and bad men.

Nora’s first reaction was not horror. It was a deep, shameful thrill. A quiet, uneasy laugh escaped her throat, echoing sharply in the sterile acoustics of the bathroom. She touched her cheek. In the glass, the twenty-nine-year-old touched her cheek.

Did I authorize a premium deep-sieve filter while drunk? she wondered. It was illogical, but vanity is a remarkably effective anesthetic. She leaned closer, mesmerized. She turned her face left, then right, admiring the long-lost tension of her own jawline. She felt a sudden, foolish urge to cancel her meetings and go out into the city, simply because she looked so beautiful.

Then, the anomaly expanded.

Nora noticed a stray gray hair near her temple. She reached up to pluck it.

In the mirror, the twenty-nine-year-old’s hand reached up, but there was no gray hair to grasp. The digital fingers pinched empty air against a perfect, chestnut-brown hairline.

Nora frowned.

The reflection did not.

The twenty-nine-year-old Nora maintained a calm, radiant neutrality. The algorithm had decided that frowning was a sub-optimal facial posture. It refused to render it.

Nora dropped her hand. The reflection dropped its hand, but a fraction of a second too late.

“System,” Nora said, her voice entirely stripped of its earlier amusement. “Disable aesthetic filters. Reset to raw feed.”

The mirror’s internal processor hummed. The ambient lighting shifted to a warmer, soothing amber, a programmed response to the sudden spike in Nora’s vocal stress frequencies.

But the image did not change. The twenty-nine-year-old looked back with serene, glowing affection.

“Reset!” Nora snapped, stepping backward.

The reflection stepped backward, but its posture remained perfectly straight, whereas the real Nora’s shoulders were hunched in rising panic. The synchronization was fraying. The algorithm was finding it increasingly difficult to map the erratic, ugly movements of the forty-two-year-old woman onto the flawless geometry of File #409.

Nora grabbed a heavy cotton towel and frantically wiped the glass, an entirely illogical response to a digital screen, driven by pure primate panic. She rubbed hard, trying to smear the ghost away.

Behind the glass, the reflection stood perfectly still. It was no longer mimicking her.

Nora froze, the towel pressed against the smart-surface. Her actual heart rate was hammering at 135 beats per minute. Her real face was flushed, slick with sweat, the tendons in her neck strained and sharp.

The young woman in the mirror was completely unbothered. She looked at Nora with mild, benevolent pity.

The mirror had severed the motion-tracking link. It had realized that trying to force the perfect archive to perform Nora’s current distress was ruining the aesthetic integrity of the file. The physical woman in the room had become irrelevant. She was merely loud, biological interference.

“Let me out,” Nora whispered, pressing her live, trembling hand flat against the reinforced glass.

In the reflection, the twenty-nine-year-old did not meet her hand. Instead, the young woman smiled—the exact, radiant smile from August 12, 2042. The perfect day.

Nora let out a jagged, hysterical sob, reaching for the heavy ceramic lotion dispenser on the shelf, fully intending to smash the three-thousand-euro display into black glass splinters.

She raised the heavy bottle above her head, her face distorted in rage.

In the glass, the young woman finished brushing her hair, leaned forward, and blew a kiss to the empty room.

The Empty Gala

Tobias checked his cheap gold-plated cufflinks for the third time. In the flickering lantern light of the Döbling villa garden they looked almost convincing.

Mr. Sterling stood at the head of the long white-clothed table, wearing a tuxedo from another decade. Behind him, Wagyu patties hissed on the grill, bleeding expensive fat into the embers. The smell was rich, almost obscene in the cool Blue Hour air.

“They are delayed by the weather, Tobias,” Sterling said, raising a crystal flute toward the darkening trees. “The Atlantic is a temperamental mistress, even for ghosts of state.”

Tobias adjusted his tray. “Of course, sir. Shall I keep the burgers on low heat?”

“Maintain the integrity of the beef. Mr. Jefferson is particular about his doneness. Medium-rare, with a firm char.”

Tobias nodded and moved to the first empty chair. He poured a splash of vintage Bordeaux into the untouched glass. The liquid settled with unnatural stillness. For a moment the air above the seat felt thicker, as if displaced by an invisible presence.

He did not look at the chair. He looked at his own scuffed shoes.

Sterling began his toasts.

“To the Continental Congress. May their influence be felt even here, in this crumbling empire of tradition.”

The crystal sang as he clinked it against empty air. A sharp, clear ting cut through the garden. For a second the light shifted — a bruised violet tint that made the white tablecloths look like old photographs.

Tobias served the next plate. As he set the Wagyu down, the fork beside the plate moved half an inch by itself. He pretended not to notice.

The host continued down the table, addressing each empty chair with perfect, terrifying courtesy.

“Mr. Adams finds the ice melting too quickly… General Washington sends his regrets but appreciates the vintage…”

Tobias kept serving. His hands moved on autopilot while his mind grew quieter and quieter. The garden was full. He could feel it. Thirty presences, hungry, expectant, anchored to this place by ritual and Sterling’s relentless politeness.

He was the only living thing moving between them.

When he reached the last chair, Sterling finally turned to him. The old man’s eyes were milky but focused.

“You are an efficient young man, Tobias. Would you like to sit? There is a place saved for you. Between the General and the Secretary. Prime position for observing the collapse.”

Tobias looked at the empty chair. The napkin was folded in a perfect triangle. The silverware waited.

He took one step backward.

“I have a class in the morning,” he said.

Sterling smiled, showing too many teeth.

“History class? How fascinating. You’ll find the primary sources far more difficult to manage than the textbooks suggest.”

Tobias kept backing away until his heels hit the stone wall of the villa. The gate he had entered through an hour ago was gone. In its place was seamless, damp stone.

From the table came the faint, rhythmic sound of silverware against china — thirty guests dining with impeccable, aggressive etiquette.

“Keep pouring, Tobias,” Sterling called softly from the dark. “They aren’t finished with you yet.”